17

SINCE THERE WAS still no sign of Aphrodite Sarah agreed to help Morandi clear up his office. He’d called her early that morning – the morning after it happened – sounding so exhausted and so utterly dejected that Sarah hadn’t even bothered to question why he hadn’t called her before. In light of what had happened it seemed both irrelevant and petty to be thinking of her own injured pride.

Now, as they stood among the charred debris, overturned furniture and smoke-blackened walls still dripping with water, trying to make some order of the chaos, Sarah was watching him, wishing she knew how to comfort him. He looked so downbeaten and weary she couldn’t help wondering how close he was to breaking.

Looking up and catching her watching him he forced a smile, but it didn’t make it to his eyes for they were too steeped in worry and helplessness to brook any other emotion.

‘Have you been in touch with the insurers yet?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I did it just before you arrived,’ he answered. ‘Someone’s coming over later.’ Then, to her dismay, he sat down heavily on a chair and dropped his head in his hands.

‘This is all such a mess,’ he muttered. ‘Such a fucking mess I don’t know which way to turn.’

Sarah went to him, put a hand on the back of his neck and started gently to massage it. Knowing that the fire had been arson, she wondered if she dared voice what was in her mind. In the end she decided to chance it. ‘You don’t suppose,’ she began tentatively, ‘that Aphrodite was behind this, do you?’

He shook his head without looking up. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.

‘Then where is she?’

‘I wish to God I knew.’

Sarah went to kneel in front of him, took his hands from his face and looking at him with her clear, sensible blue eyes said, ‘I think it’s time you told me what’s really going on here, don’t you?’

He nodded, and kept on nodding for some time, before saying, in a voice that rasped with fatigue, ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

She waited, holding his hands in hers and watching the way he seemed to be searching his mind for where to begin.

‘You must have guessed by now that it’s blackmail,’ he said forlornly.

Sarah nodded.

He laughed dryly, as though despising himself, then in a tone that was brutal and self-punishing, he said, ‘I take the cameras to Consuela’s whenever she asks me. I set them up in hidden niches of the guest rooms in the bathhouse – she always tells me which rooms to go into – and then we video her rich friends and all they get up to with the boys. Then, needless to say, the videos are used to extort money from the women with threats to show their husbands, or fathers, or God knows who, if they don’t pay up.’

‘But that’s terrible,’ Sarah murmured, disappointed with the inadequacy of the word, but unable to think of another.

‘Oh, it’s worse than that,’ he said, injecting his voice with a biting revulsion. ‘Some women have paid up and the videos have been put into the wrong hands anyway, just for the hell of it. Just to see the women suffer and in some cases lose everything.’

‘Dear God,’ Sarah muttered, thinking of the women she had met at the bathhouse the one time she had been there and wondering if any of them had yet been made to pay such a dreadful price for what they’d assumed to be after-dinner relaxation. ‘But why are you doing it?’ she said. ‘You don’t seem like a man without morals, but …’

‘I do have morals,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s just not wise to show them too often when you’re dealing with people like Consuela Santini and Jake Mallory.’

‘So Jake is behind it,’ Sarah murmured, her heart going out to Louisa for how horribly she’d been duped.

Morandi shook his head. ‘Depends who you’re talking to,’ he answered. ‘Consuela claims it’s all his idea. He says it’s hers.’

‘So how did you come to be involved?’

Morandi sighed heavily. ‘Now that’s a long story,’ he said. ‘It started about two years ago when Peter, my youngest brother, came down to the Riviera to get a job. He didn’t have anything particular in mind, you know what kids are like, he just wanted to bum around for a while and have a good time. Which is what he did. Then he called me one day after he’d been here a couple of weeks and told me he’d landed himself a real cushy number with some rich lady. He said the pay was out of this world and the perks were even better. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what the perks were, Peter’s a good-looking boy, keeps himself in good shape and has always had a certain way with the ladies. I didn’t see any harm in him being a bit of a gigolo for a while, I’d have probably done the same thing at his age given half the chance, so I didn’t think too much about it. That was until he stopped calling. Two months or more went by with no letter, no postcard, no phone call. He’d never told me this rich woman’s name, nor given me her number and knowing that the Riviera is virtually littered with them I didn’t know where to start. My sisters were frantic with worry, so I got myself on a plane and came down here to see if I could find him. Needless to say I got nowhere. I didn’t even know which town the woman lived in, never mind the street. I contacted the police, but there wasn’t much they could do – students are passing through all the time, taking on temporary jobs before moving on somewhere else and forgetting to tell their families where. In the end I went back to England none the wiser and feeling twice my age with worry. It wasn’t like him not to be in touch for so long, so I knew something had to have happened.

‘Then suddenly one day there was a knock on my door and there he was. I could hardly believe it. I’d never said anything to the rest of the family, but I’d almost given up hope of ever seeing him again. There were two men with him, one was Jake, I forget the other one’s name now, but it isn’t important. They’d brought Peter back, that was all that was important to me.

‘Anyway, it seemed that Peter had told Jake something about me – I’d made a few low-budget movies by then, mainly for the European market, much like I’ve been doing down here. There’s money in it and, like I told you, I have two ex-wives and an army of kids to support. It didn’t take Jake long to get around to offering to set me up in business down here, he’s not a man to hang around as I’ve since found out. He was prepared to set me up, he said, in return for a few small favours. Well, since he’d just brought Peter back I felt it was I who owed him a favour and I was right, I did, because it wasn’t until Jake had gone that Peter told me where he had been and what had been happening during the past three months. Apparently, it took him several weeks to catch on to what was going on at Consuela’s, but as soon as he did he told her he wanted out. She didn’t seem to mind, he said, in fact quite the reverse, she seemed to want to help him find another job, or pay for his flight back to England, or whatever he wanted. Obviously she swore him to secrecy about what was going on, and it was only later that he realized what a mug he was to have believed that she was going to let him out of there with only his word as his bond when he knew all that he did.

‘That was where Jake came in. As Peter tells the story Jake arranged for someone to take a dinghy into Consuela’s private beach late at night, pick Peter up and take him to the Ile Sainte Marguerite where he stayed for two or three days before the Valhalla came to take him over to Corsica. Jake wasn’t on board, but he was in Corsica when Peter got there. That was when he told Peter what was going to happen to him.’

‘And what was that?’ Sarah asked clearing her throat.

‘He had a choice,’ Morandi smiled grimly. ‘He could either be shot right there and then and buried where no one would ever find the grave, or he could opt for being kept prisoner for the rest of his life in some place so remote he’d never even know which country he was in.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Sarah murmured ‘That’s monstrous.’

‘No, that’s blackmail,’ he corrected. ‘Or what happens to those who get mixed up in it, because innocent or guilty, someone almost always ends up paying with their life.’

Echoes of Louisa’s same observation passed chillingly through Sarah’s mind. ‘So how did Peter get around it?’ she said.

‘Jake got him around it. The choice wasn’t being offered by Jake, you understand, it was being offered by Consuela. Or that’s what Jake told Peter and Peter believed him. And who can blame Peter for believing him, as far as Peter’s concerned Jake saved his life. As far as I was concerned at the time, I believed it too, so of course I was prepared to do Jake a favour. He was perfectly straight with me, he told me it wouldn’t be legal, that there was every chance one or other of us, if not all of us, might end up in jail. But he said he’d do everything he could to get me off should it ever come to that and in the meantime I wouldn’t even have to think about how I was going to meet my alimony payments because he’d take care of everything. Which he has.

‘So, I gave up my flat in Barnet and moved down here. By then I’d met Jake a few more times, I liked him, trusted him and believed the story he gave me. He said that when Consuela’s husband died he’d left her penniless. It wasn’t that the old man didn’t have any money, it was just that he hadn’t left it to Consuela. Jake didn’t say why Consuela was cut out of the will and I didn’t ask. However, she was bequeathed the villa on the Cap, but with no money to pay for its upkeep and the running of it, she turned the stables into a bathhouse and set herself up in this blackmail racket.’

He paused, pressed his fingers to his tired eyes then returned his hand to hers. ‘According to Jake she’d been doing it for about a year before Peter came along,’ he continued. ‘I can’t remember when Jake said he found out about it, but when he did he started making it his business to get the boys out of France and either safely back to their families or over to the States, where his father uses his influence to get them set-up there. Why are you smiling?’

‘No reason,’ Sarah answered, thinking of how Louisa was going to love this part of the story. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, according to Jake, there was one thing he couldn’t do and that was get his hands on the videos before they were used for blackmail.’

‘But why would he want to?’

‘To stop it from happening, or so he claims. So, he struck a bargain with Consuela. In return for something he’s never told me about, he would take the videos to the women concerned, or their husbands, and make himself responsible for collecting the money. And as far as I know that’s exactly what he does.’

‘You mean he’s also the one who hands the videos over just for the hell of it?’ Sarah said, her admiration for Jake suddenly teetering on the edge of repugnance.

‘I don’t know,’ Morandi sighed. ‘I wish I did. All I know is that the blackmail is still going on, that money in quantities like I’ve never seen before is changing hands all the time and that I wish to God I’d never got involved.’

‘You still haven’t told me exactly how you did,’ Sarah reminded him.

‘Jake got me to masquerade as an Italian, someone who had connections with the Mafia because that would impress Consuela and make her more inclined to trust me, and go to her offering my services as a producer. I’m pretty sure she had me checked out, but Jake took care of that, don’t ask me how because I don’t know, but I can only assume he was able to do it because he does have Mafia connections. Anyway, she hired me and now I go in, set up the cameras, collect them the next day and then I edit them together.’

‘But you still don’t really know which of them is behind it?’

‘On the face of it it’s Consuela, but the truth is, Sarah, I don’t know whether I’ve been taken for one hell of a ride here, because if Jake really is trying to frame Consuela for blackmail, which is what he claims he’s doing, then he’s got more than enough evidence now. I know, because I’m the one who keeps the records, who logs all the dates, all the transactions, everything, so why doesn’t he just hand it and her over to the police and let us all get on with our lives?’

Since it was a rhetorical question Sarah merely squeezed his hands and settled herself more comfortably in the clutter of burnt papers, melted videos and heat-buckled film cans.

‘Is it,’ he asked himself aloud, ‘because he’s the one who set up the bathhouse? Is he the one who’s profiting from this loathsome extortion? Consuela says he is. She won’t tell me what he’s holding over her to make her go along with it, but according to her he’s behind everything. She says he was the one who set up the bathhouse, that he’s the one who hires the boys, brings in the rich women and collects the money. But there are so many lies, I just can’t keep track of them any more.’

‘Have you ever considered going to the police and letting them sort it out?’

‘All the time. But how can I when Jake knows where Peter is, where my whole family is? Not that he’s ever threatened anything, but I just don’t want to take the risk.’

‘Does that mean, in your heart, you really do think Jake is behind it?’

‘God knows,’ he sighed. ‘For all I know they’re in it together.’

‘But let’s just say for a moment that it was Consuela who started it. What do you think it was that Jake used to bargain with her to get her to let him in on it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well he can’t just have sailed in out of the blue and said OK, let’s go fifty-fifty, can he? Not if she had it all set up very nicely for herself already. Why would she need him? So my question is, what does he have over her that would persuade her to let him in on it?’

‘I’ve no idea. He’s never said.’

‘This might be totally off the wall, but you don’t suppose it might have something to do with his wife, do you?’

Morandi frowned. ‘I didn’t even know he was married.’

‘Consuela told Danny he was.’

Morandi shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that. All I know about is the unholy mess I’ve managed to get myself in and I just can’t see a way out of it.’

Sarah thought for a moment. ‘What about Mexico?’ she said. ‘Where does that fit in?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t ask because I know more than I want to know already.’

‘But it could have something to do with the remote places where the boys are held prisoner after being confronted with Hobson’s choice?’ she suggested.

‘Yes, it could, I suppose, I’ve never really thought about it. But to be honest, Sarah, I don’t think anyone’s being held prisoner. Neither do I think anyone’s been shot. OK, I might be kidding myself here because I don’t want to believe it, but if all those boys had gone missing, don’t you think at least one of them would have been traced back to Consuela by now?’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said deflating slightly. ‘Yes, I suppose they would.’ Then realizing that meant Jake had returned to a better light she brightened again. ‘I think Consuela’s behind it,’ she said decisively. ‘I mean Jake is a massively wealthy man, so why would he need to do something like that?’

‘You won’t be able to ask me anything I haven’t already asked myself a thousand times,’ Morandi said despondently. ‘But neither of us is going to come up with any answers, not unless we have the full picture.’

‘So what’s missing?’ Sarah said, trying to piece together what she could.

‘I would say that what’s missing is what Jake has over Consuela or what she has over him. And that’s still assuming they’re not in it together.’

‘Oh God, you’re not much better as a detective’s sidekick than Louisa,’ Sarah grumbled.

Morandi’s eyes flickered something very close to an admonishment, making Sarah realize that even after all she had heard, she was not taking this as seriously as she should. Or maybe it was because of what she had heard, it was hard to say, all she knew was that her sense of reality was once again as woefully impaired as her spirit of adventure was piqued.

‘Jake has made Louisa promise to stay away from Consuela,’ she said sobering herself. ‘Now why do you think that is? Do you think he’s afraid that Consuela might do something to harm her?’

‘He could be. Or he could be afraid that Consuela will tell Louisa what’s really going on.’

‘Mm,’ she grunted. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way. I don’t think Louisa has either. Though he did say he was going to tell Louisa himself.’

‘Then we’ll just have to see if he does.’

‘What about Erik? He must know what’s really happening between Jake and Consuela, surely?’

‘I don’t doubt for a minute that he does, but you’ll never get him to tell you anything Jake doesn’t want him to tell.’

‘Then who else is there?’

‘No one.’

‘But hang on, didn’t you tell me the other day that you thought Aphrodite knew more than you? Why don’t we try asking her?’

‘We could if we knew where she was. Not that I’d hold out much hope of her telling us anything, and I could be wrong, she might not know more than I do.’

‘But she might,’ Sarah said staring thoughtfully down at a pool of black slush in the corner. ‘Funny isn’t it?’ she said turning her eyes back to Morandi. ‘That she should have disappeared the very same day this place was wrecked. Are you sure you don’t think she might have done it?’

‘Why would she? Unless,’ he said answering his own question, ‘Consuela told her to.’

‘I thought you said Jake employed her.’

‘I always thought he did. But one thing I’m certain about is that Jake didn’t order this place to be burnt. He postponed his trip to Mexico because of it, now why would he have done that if he already knew it was going to happen?’

‘No reason I can think of,’ Sarah said. ‘So does that mean we might find Aphrodite at Consuela’s, I wonder?’

‘We might, who knows?’

An hour later, while Sarah and Morandi were still ploughing through the destruction of his office there was a knock on the empty door frame and two policemen walked into the mayhem, turning up their noses at the damp, acrid smell of the place.

Assuming that they were continuing their investigations into the burglary and arson and because Morandi was speaking to them in French Sarah didn’t pay much attention at first. But then, seeing the way Morandi’s face suddenly turned so horribly pale, she moved swiftly to his side and took his arm.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What are they saying?’

‘They’ve come to tell me,’ he said, sounding as haggard as he looked, ‘that Aphrodite … Aphrodite’s body has just been found …’